Free Republic

The situation has all the elements that the president seeks: a showdown with a top political rival in a deep blue state over an issue core to his agenda.It is the fight President Trump had been waiting for, a showdown with a top political rival in a deep blue state over an issue core to his political agenda.In bypassing the authority of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, to call in the National Guard to quell protests in the Los Angeles area over his administration’s efforts to deport more migrants, Mr. Trump is now pushing the boundaries of presidential...

President Trump has long mused about using troops to crush violent protests or riots in blue-state cities. He is now moving to do so in Los Angeles.Setting up a rare use of military force on domestic soil, President Trump ordered the Pentagon on Saturday night to send at least 2,000 National Guard troops to respond to protests in Los Angeles set off by his immigration crackdown.Mr. Trump has long mused about using military force on domestic soil to crush violent protests or riots, fight crime and hunt for undocumented migrants — a move that his aides talked him out of...

It is one of the more baffling story lines of Donald J. Trump’s second term. The president has said he wants to personally visit Fort Knox to ensure that no one has stolen the government-owned gold bars that are stored there. Mr. Trump has not explained why any gold might be missing from the nation’s heavily guarded reserves. His own Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has insisted that there is no reason to worry. “All the gold is there,” Mr. Bessent emphatically told Bloomberg in February, at one point looking directly into a camera and addressing the American people. Mr. Trump’s...

The Trump administration sees tariff talks as a chance to pressure a rival into concessions. E.U. officials have acted as though they were dealing with an ally. The European Union has been following tried-and-true rules of global commerce as it tries to negotiate with the Trump administration to avert painful tariffs on cars, pharmaceuticals and just about everything else.The problem? President Trump is ripping up that rule book.Mr. Trump announced in a Truth Social post on Friday morning that he is recommending a 50 percent tariff on European imports as of June 1, claiming that the bloc’s trade barriers, taxes,...

In a reversal, President Trump appears to have backed off joining a European push for new sanctions on Russia, seemingly eager to move on to doing business deals with it.For months, President Trump has been threatening to simply walk away from the frustrating negotiations for a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine.After a phone call on Monday between Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, that appears to be exactly what the American president is doing. The deeper question now is whether he is also abandoning America’s three-year-long project to support Ukraine, a nascent democracy that he has frequently...

A raid on Abby’s Bakery in Los Fresnos heralded the crackdown to come. Ahead of the owners’ trial for “harboring” undocumented workers, the community is seeing the impact of the president’s policies.Most mornings, Leonardo Baez, a father of seven, wakes up hours before sunrise to mix bread dough in the border city of Los Fresnos, Texas. Punishing and laborious work, yes, but owning a beloved bakery has been a lifelong dream of his, he said.It is now in jeopardy.In February, federal agents swooped down on his shop, Abby’s Bakery, detained workers they said were in the country illegally and pressed...

At home, President Trump is ordering up investigations into his political opponents and finding creative ways to use his executive power to ruin the lives of even some of his milder critics.Abroad, Mr. Trump has sent a different message: Let bygones be bygones. Even if those bygones involved trying to assassinate him or working with Al Qaeda.In a series of speeches and off-the-cuff remarks during the first major foreign trip of his second term, Mr. Trump has told audiences in the Middle East that he is willing to set the past aside in the interests of peace and profit.“I have...

President Trump has long railed against drug traffickers. He has said they should be given the death penalty “for their heinous acts.” On the first day of his second term, he signed an executive order listing cartels as “terrorist organizations.”But many public health and addiction experts fear that his budget proposals and other actions effectively punish people who use drugs and struggle with addiction.The Trump administration has vowed to reduce overdose deaths, one of the country’s deadliest public health crises, by emphasizing law enforcement, border patrols and tariffs against China and Mexico to keep out fentanyl and other dangerous drugs....

Billionaire investors are in an unfamiliar position, watching and cringing as tariffs roll on and the stock market reels.Wall Street billionaires are not used to being on the outside looking in. But that is where they find themselves after President Trump ignored their appeals to call off his tariff plans which they fear could endanger the economy. With the backdrop of rapidly mounting stock market losses, corporate titans have worked every angle — phone calls, social media and even a typically staid shareholder letter — to try to change Mr. Trump’s mind. The day after the president announced his most...

Free trade has been so beneficial to so many countries that the world may find a way to live without its biggest player.President Trump’s self-proclaimed “liberation day,” in which he announced across-the-board tariffs on the United States’ trading partners, carries an echo of another moment when an advanced Western economy threw up walls around itself.Like Brexit, Britain’s fateful vote nearly nine years ago to leave the European Union, Mr. Trump’s tariffs struck a hammer blow at the established order. He is pulling the United States out of the global economy much as Britain withdrew from a continentwide trading bloc, in...

No, the headline does not deceive you. The New York Times got its pants in a bunch over President Donald Trump daring to refer to violent Mexican drug cartels as “terrorists” because it could supposedly harm the economy. “How Labeling Cartels ‘Terrorists’ Could Hurt the U.S. Economy,” read the asinine January 22 news item from Times correspondents Maria Abi-Habib and Simon Romero. The authors railed against Trump’s executive order designating the cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations” and claimed that it “could force some American companies to forgo doing business in Mexico rather than risk U.S. sanctions.” Yeah, how dare Trump...

The New York Times editorial board was despondent over President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive victory, declaring his return to power was a “grave threat” to the republic. “American voters have made the choice to return Donald Trump to the White House, setting the nation on a precarious course that no one can fully foresee,” the board wrote on Wednesday, later adding, “Mr. Trump’s election poses a grave threat to [the] republic, but he will not determine the long-term fate of American democracy. That outcome remains in the hands of the American people.” Trump capped a stunning political comeback from his defeat...

A Swiss human experimenter, a Hungarian Nazi collaborator, and an Iranian tech tycoon walk into Washington D.C. What do you call them? The absentee owners of the Democrat Party. It’s not a joke. Unfortunately it’s grimly serious. Politico recently reported that the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the leading dark money machine of the Left, had pumped $410 million into Dem 2020 efforts to defeat Trump and Republicans. The Sixteen Thirty Fund had raised a record $390 million that year and half the money came from just 4 donors. While the names of the donors are secret, the article did note the...

So weird this happens right before midterms that might produce a red wave.The midterms happen in November. People expect a huge red wave.So weird that the State Department has offered up to $10 million for any information on foreign interference in our elections:The reward offer seeks information leading to the identification or location of any foreign person or entity who knowingly engaged or is engaging in foreign election interference. The reward offer also seeks information leading to the prevention, frustration, or favorable resolution of an act of foreign election interference, including by dismantling, in whole or significant part, an organization...

If you have been following the saga of Hunter’s Laptop from Hell, you will know that we are now in Phase Two of the coverup. In Phase One you were told that the laptop was the creation of the Russians designed to sabotage Joe Biden’s campaign for President. That lie has now collapsed, so in Phase Two we are being told that whatever Hunter was up to, it has nothing to do with Joe. Hunter may have spent his time up to his eyeballs in hookers and blow and kept company with a lot of unsavory characters, but Joe knew...

Hunter Biden used the perks of the vice presidency — parties, meetings with Joe Biden and flights on Air Force Two — to pursue business deals with Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim while his father was in office, records show. Hunter’s involvement with Slim, at one time the world’s richest man, commenced soon after a White House state dinner the magnate attended in May 2010, along with Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, to honor Mexican President Felipe Calderon. The diary on Hunter’s abandoned laptop shows he and Slim were both guests at a State Department luncheon during Calderon’s visit, which...

Rewind to this article about Carlos Slim Helu of Mexico aka the richest man in the world for many years and stockholder in the NY Times. Joe Biden, Carlos Slim Helu - Bing images This is the man who lost 8 BILLION dollars in the stock market the morning Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton. Slim was also a big donor to the Clinton Foundation. (see below) TTC has seen too much of Helu, who is many more times the billionaire that Soros is, to not believe he's in the middle of the open border and SO much more bad policy...

A New York state judge on Friday ordered the New York Times to return internal documents to the conservative activist group Project Veritas, a restriction the newspaper said violates decades of First Amendment protections. In an unusual written ruling, Justice Charles Wood of the Westchester County Supreme Court directed the New York Times to return to Project Veritas any physical copies of legal memos prepared by one of the group's lawyers, and to destroy electronic versions. Wood had entered a temporary order against the New York Times last month, drawing criticism from freedom of the press advocates. Project Veritas, led...

PART 2 OF 3. The Hunter Biden Files Hunter Biden and his business partners were involved in discussions about possible deals in dozens of foreign countries, often corrupt backwaters, at times invoking official channels like ambassadors, emails reviewed by The Daily Wire show. While most attention has focused on Ukraine, where a gas company paid the now-president’s son tens of thousands of dollars a month while he was in deep crack addiction, and China, Hunter and his partners at a consultancy called Rosemont Seneca were eager to do business in a vast array of other places. The map below highlights...

From one Laptop: “Breakfast with Dad — NavObs” is one such meeting recorded for 8:30 am on November 19, 2015. Five photographs date-stamped on that day and taken at 10:03 am and 10:04 am appear on the laptop, showing Joe posing with four of Hunter’s business associates, including Mexican billionaires Carlos Slim and Miguel Alemán Velasco. One photo also features Velasco’s son Miguel Aleman Magnani, the founder of budget airline Interjet, at whose Acapulco mansion Hunter and wife Kathleen had stayed that March. Jeff Cooper, a long-time Biden family benefactor, who ran one of the largest asbestos-litigation firms in the...